The small distance between a viewer's left eye and right eye results in a small difference between the two viewpoints from the viewer's left eye and right eye. This difference in viewpoints generates a slight displacement between two scenes observed respectively by the viewer's left and right eyes. This displacement is also called the parallax between the left and right eyes which allows the viewer to perceive a three-dimensional (3D) effect.
When an image source transmits a 3D image to a display device, usually two images are required to be transmitted separately. One is provided to be viewed by a viewer's left eye (a left image); while the other is provided to be viewed by the viewer's right eye (a right image). Through the parallax between the left eye and right eye, the viewer can perceive a 3D image from the left image and the right image. A variety of transmission formats may be used to transmit the left image and the right image. One of the formats is a side-by-side format. Further, to be compatible with existing two-dimensional (2D) image transmission formats, which require only one image, the left and right images are separately compressed in the horizontal direction, with a compression ratio of 2:1, to ensure that the same amount of image data as 2D images is transmitted.
A 3D display device may have a window to display 3D images, called a 3D window. When the 3D window has an odd-number of pixel columns, the total pixels of the left image and the right image in the horizontal direction is also an odd number. Thus, if there is an error in determining the boundary between the left image and the right image, the last pixel of one image may be treated as the first pixel of the other image, or the first pixel of one image may be treated as the last pixel of the other image. Such error can create two possible undesired consequences in a final image generated from the left and right images: (1) if the difference between the pixel at the edge of the left image and the pixel at the edge of the right image is large, the decompressed image of the left image or the right image may have very different pixels at the edge because the pixels at the edge is generated from interpolation based on the mixed pixel value; and (2) the misplaced pixel from one image to the other is equivalent to a shift in space, which changes the parallax between the left image and the right image and may cause the viewer to feel a distortion of the depth of the 3D object associated with the left and right images.
The disclosed methods and systems are directed to solve one or more problems set forth above and other problems.